Hi all
My situation is. I have a project planned to be built on ASP.NET MVC 2. And one of the major requirements is SEO optimization. A customer wants to use static-like URLs that end up with .html extension for this project that make URLs more SEO friendly. E.g. "mysite.com/about.html " or "mysite.com/items/getitem/5.html" etc.
I wonder is there any benefit from SEO perspective to use .html extension in dynamic URLs? Are Google and other search engines rank work better with such URLs?
I would use sitemaps instead, this enables you to have dynamic content (and to use MVC) but still be crawled completely.
See: http://www.google.com/support/webmasters/bin/answer.py?hl=en&answer=156184 and http://www.codinghorror.com/blog/2008/10/the-importance-of-sitemaps.html
Search engines don't care at all at what your webpage extensions look like.
If anything all you're doing indicating a file type for the page served up.
That's what a search engine is worried about. Anyone can create a custom solution using custom file extensions for a website and have it work just fine.
No, the base URL doesn't matter. If you're serving dynamic content in .aspx or .html, it's all the same. If you do serve ASP.NET content with .html because of requirements (as dumb as they may be), then I suggest finding an alternative extension (e.g. .htm) for all static content. You don't want your static HTML files getting processed unnecessarily.
As Femaref said, you can use sitemaps to help.
Also, make sure your URL doesn't change (including variables) if the content is the same. This shouldn't be a problem with MVC.
Edit: In your example: mysite.com/items/getitem/5.html
I'm guessing what you originally wanted is: mysite.com/items/getitem/5
No extension doesn't make a difference either. Since that's not a problem, I would also argue that an extension makes the URL less "clean" and also suggests that there is a file called 5.html in that path, which is obviously not true.